Few days ago, a dear friend of mine asked me what does he need for his new small home professional production house. I took this opportunity to share with you how I will design his new IT infrastructure. The topic will be consists of a group of articles covers the updates in the project.

Production House X:

Information and requirement gathering is the first phase of planning for any new IT infrastructure. Each infrastructure is different that others. The difference between infrastructure designs are because factors such as total budget, maintenance requirements, future upgrade consideration, and the type of business.

Step 1: Do your homework

The first step into gather information and requirement is learning more about the field of the business. Since Production House X is a production house that produces high quality corporate videos for different customers. Thus, I have built in hypothesis that the PHX needs a sophisticated file sharing server. I presume that all their footage is large. As a result, high-speed network is a must.

Step 2: Meeting

Second step is having a meeting with the client to learn more about his requirements and about his/her business. Start your meeting by asking the client basic question about the field of the business, what is a daily routine of it and how is it going so far. It is important to ask these question, so you can break the ice between you and the client if you do not know the client in person. Also, these questions show that you as a consultant is interested about the business and the client at the same time.

Next, it is important to ask question about the management of the business. I mean ask questions about what of roles is in the business and how many employees is in the business as an example. It is important to know about the managerial process, because from a security point of view, it is important to hide data from unauthorized personnel even within the same business.

Finally, start to ask the technical questions such as what technology do you currently use, what are the issues the business are currently facing, and what type of data do your business generate. It is important to ask a lot about the type the data is generating daily, because data is the most critical asset of any business.